


Saying Goodbye to Who I Might Have Been

by StoicLastStand



Category: Captain Marvel (2019)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Doing the ‘Right’ thing, F/F, Implied Air Force Wives, Implied Second Parent Carol Danvers, Loving and letting go, Past Brainwashing, Past Relationships, Why Carol Danvers left (again), past genocide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-12
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-11-16 08:18:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18090758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StoicLastStand/pseuds/StoicLastStand
Summary: Carol’s searched her whole life for a home, twice.  She’s found the same one both times.  All she wants to do is stay there, even when she can’t.





	Saying Goodbye to Who I Might Have Been

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the movie! Watch out!
> 
> It bugged me that Carol could spend six years trying to find out who she was then immediately drop that to journey through space helping people that days ago were her ‘kill on sight’ enemies. So I thought to myself, why would a reasonable person do this? This fic answers that question.

Carol leaves and Maria wants to hate her. Maria never could hate Carol. Even when she walks through the door to their house with an adorably confused expression, glowing hands, and a shrug. As though the last six years of pure hell, of raising her daughter as a single parent for the first time in their lives, was something that could be shrugged away. Maria has risked everything for Carol, for loving Carol and in return all she’d gotten was a cardboard box full of the leftover ‘personal effects’ of the woman she loved and a triangularly folded flag. It wasn’t enough.

They talk together, before Carol leaves. The two of them sit beside each other on the porch swing that Carol had hung there a lifetime ago and Maria can feel the tears welling up in her eyes at the familiar (missed) warmth of the blonde woman beside her. “You can stay, you know.” Maria had said in a soft tone, too scared to be harder for fear that once she started she wouldn’t stop until she’d screamed Carol into submission. Which, for the record, had never once happened. Carol only ever submitted when she wanted to. Carol could be knocked down, but Maria had never seen anyone (even a supreme alien AI) keep her there. “Make a home here.” The ‘with us’ was silent but by the flinch around Carol’s eyes they both heard it.

“I know.” Carol’s voice was equally soft with an underlying thread of amazement. As though no one had ever offered her a home. It was the same tone she’d had when Maria had asked Carol to move in with her and Monica nearly ten years ago. The same tone when they’d decided to buy this very house together. The same tone she’d used ever single time Maria had asked her best friend, her love, to build a life together. This time Maria couldn’t prevent the slow spill of tears from tumbling down her cheeks. Carol’s voice was reverent as she continued, as though confessing to her god. “I want that. I want to be the woman you see when you look at me. The mother Monica hugs when she hugs me. I want so badly to be the person that belongs here that if I could taste it I would taste nothing else. I would fight so hard, so hard, to belong here. I would bleed for it and...” Carol’s growing passion deflates as her shoulders sag with some unbearable weight. “And you would die for it, you and Monica.”

Maria lays her hand over Carol’s, not a caress, just a touch of comfort. She never could prevent herself from reaching out to the feisty blonde. “What are you talking about?” The question is full of genuine curiosity. Maria feels, well, she feels alien and out of place when it comes to dealing with where Carol has been in the past six years. She’d gladly feel that for the rest of her life if it meant she got to keep Carol.

“The Kree Empire spans galaxies. It has over a thousand loyal planets.” This time Carol’s voice is blank, as though speaking of some near meaningless fact she’d been told as a child, like Monica’s rote memorization of the multiplication table. “Forty percent of the population is involved in the war effort. Of those only a third are soldiers. There are more soldiers in the Kree Empire than there are people on C-53. No one has ever survived denying the Supreme Intelligence. The standard pacification procedure for traitorous planets is an orbital bombardment followed by a planetary occupation by ground forces, rounding up the surviving population. The survivors are then held in reeducation camps until the Supreme Intelligence determines their minds free of traitorous thoughts.”

Maria blinks at Carol’s blank face recitation. This was not the Carol she knew. The Carol she knew was full of fire, that Carol would have raged against these bare facts.

“The Starforce is comprised of the top point zero zero five percent of Kree soldiers. As elite soldiers, they engage in specialized and highly dangerous tasks. Such as the hunting down and suppressing of terrorists. Yon Rogg’s strike team was known to Hala as one of the most efficient anti-terrorist squad on Starforce. They were revered as Noble Warrior Heroes, protectors of the Kree people, defenders of the just and honourable Supreme Intelligence.”

Carol blinked and her eyes gleamed with unshed tears. “We were killers. Murderers without mercy. Worse, because we didn’t even know what monsters we were.” Carol’s warm hand, still underneath Maria’s light touch, trembled. “I don’t even know how many I’ve killed. I can’t count how many I’ve burned out of life with my bare hands. I couldn’t possibly calculate how many my actions have arranged death for, wouldn’t even know where to start or how to track it. “ The blonde’s voice filled with disdain, all directed at herself. “What innocent lives have I stopped while being a so called Noble Warrior Hero in this unjust war?”

Maria didn’t think, didn’t pause to consider that it’s been years and Carol is still struggling to remember who she truly was. Didn’t think that the warrior who’d lived as an elite kill squad member might be a little high strung from years of battle and death. Maria drew her friend into her, holding her tightly as a reminder that she was not alone. Carol burrowed her head into the comfort offered by Maria’s neck and breathed deeply, the smell one that haunted her nightmares and filled her heart.

“I can’t even feel it, even knowing that it’s there.” Carol paused and Maria didn’t even know what to ask for clarification, she was lost about what Carol was trying to say. The blonde correctly read the silence. “The Supreme Intelligence uses bionanomesh to commune mind to mind with people. During this, talking is not all it can do.”

Carol draws in a shuddering breath, bracing herself. “Re-education. Such a polite word for the absolute rewriting of a persons mind, their very self. It can’t create emotional response, thankfully. But it can deaden them. Tell a person, over and over, something horrible and deaden how horrible it is. Eventually all they see is something necessary, something normal. Do it subconsciously and they can’t even fight against it. They just, adjust.” A careless shrug. “Learn how to live with the unlivable. Learn how to not see the blood, the death, the responsibility. Pray they never remember. Fall apart when they do.”

Maria felt the wet hot dampness against her neck, the silent proof that Carol had remembered more than her forgotten life on Earth.

“Fuck, Photon.” Carol’s voice was harsh with emotion and Maria shook off the completely inappropriate shock of arousal and love at hearing her call sign fall from Carol’s lips once more. “I could live with that. I could.” The determination was fierce in Carol’s voice and Maria wondered who she was trying to convince more, Maria or herself? “I could say fuck the Kree Empire, fuck the stars, fuck the lives I’ve taken and live here. Rebuild a life here, make a home with you and Monica. I could be happy.”

Carol pulled back from Maria’s neck. Maria’s arms still tight around her, Carol starred into Maria’s equally wet dark eyes, searching. “They wouldn’t let me. Ronan will never let a weapon like me go. The Accuser will return within three days, probably a little less, with as large a force as he can gather. If I’m here, if I’m anywhere on this planet, he and battle cruisers he’ll bring with him will begin the pacification protocol. A cockroach would be lucky to survive the orbital bombardment.” Carol’s face turned hard, her determination a physical presence on the swing with them. “I won’t risk you or Monica being hurt because I was too greedy to leave.”

They sit in silence a moment, Carol snuggling into Maria’s neck once more. Maria tries to conceptualize it. An alien invasion with the sole purpose of flushing Carol out from her hiding place. It’s not real. Can’t be. Alien invasions belong on tv and in books, not real life. It is real. Can’t not be. Carol is warm and heavy in her arms, smelling of familiar honeysuckle shampoo and unfamiliar fresh air after a rain storm.

“So this is it then?” Maria muses, half to herself. “I get you back only to lose you? The woman I love, returned from the dead only to spend the rest of her life flying around the galaxy leaving me on Earth? The child we raised getting her parent back only to be an orphan again?” Carol stiffens in Maria’s arms, preparing herself for Maria’s hate, her rage, her grief. “Days like this, I really wonder why I pray. Sometimes, it don’t seem like God’s listening.” Maria strokes a soothing hand down Carol’s back, urging her lover into her embrace once more. “I’d do it again, you know. All of it, even today, even if I knew before I started where we’d end. I don’t regret you Carol, I never will. So don’t you dare regret me.”

Carol clings to Maria’s shoulders and sobs helplessly into her skin. “Never, Photon, never.” The snuggle together in the ruckus of a Louisiana night, listening to the air moving between them and the insects chirping in the background of their togetherness. “Be happy? I couldn’t bare remembering you only to think that you’re sad because of me.”

“You too,” Maria soothed, kissing the blonde hair in front of her. “I’ll be happy, and I’ll help Monica be happy, if you do too.”


End file.
